Recently, it is a common scene to place an image forming apparatus, such as a copy machine, in a convenience store or the like at the corner of a street to provide a copy service. A plurality of users bring in book originals, sheet originals or so and use it without constraint. In recent years, digitalization of image forming apparatuses has been advanced and multifunction type image forming apparatuses equipped with a printer function, a copy function and a FAX function which electronically scan an original image with a scanner device and print it out with a laser printer or so, have been commercialized. The merits of the digitalization are high quality outputs, free image processing, 1-scan multicopying, storage of electronic data of originals, and so forth, and are proposed as new document services on the market.
With the advancement of digitalization of image forming apparatuses, the technologies of erasing stored image data are disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. S59-50660, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H9-223061, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H9-284572, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. S63-6575, and Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H6-4766 in order to prevent data, scanned by a scanner and stored on a hard disk or so, from being used by a third party without permission.
As a plurality of people uses an image forming apparatus in a store, such as a convenience store, it is necessary to surely erase stored image data. However, the image information processing method described in the Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. S59-50660 has a problem such that as image data is erased immediately after scanning the image data or after a predetermined time elapses after scanning of the image data, a user cannot use the function of reading scanned image data again and copying it (so-called electronic filing function). In stores, such as convenience stores, therefore, demands for developing image processing systems capable of effectively using the functions of digital image forming apparatuses have increased.
The present invention has been made in view of the above-described situations, and aims at providing an image processing method, an image processing system and an image forming apparatus which can effectively use the functions of a digital image forming apparatus while ensuring the security of image data of a user by invalidating stored image data when valuable information, which is managed by a valuable information processing apparatus, such as a coin vendor, fulfills a predetermined condition.
It is another object of the invention to provide an image processing method, an image processing system and an image forming apparatus which can effectively use the functions of a digital image forming apparatus while ensuring the security of image data of a user by invalidating stored image data in response to an instruction from an information processing apparatus.
It is a further object of the invention to provide an image processing system, etc., which can invalidate image data after image formation by a user is surely finished, by invalidating the image data stored under the condition that an adjustment process on image data to be invalidated is completed by an information processing apparatus.